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Obesity & pesticides: The untold story

Get your kids to exercise, eat right, and control their portions — these steps can help combat childhood obesity, we're told. But new research on persistent chemicals points to the fact that as parents, we're not getting the whole story.

Researchers in Spain found that whether a child, especially a girl, will be obese is not just dependent on lifestyle choices, but also on the child’s exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) before birth. As a mother of a 4-year-old daughter, this worries me tremendously.

The Spanish researchers followed 344 children from birth to age 6.5 years, and found that exposure in the womb to certain POPs such as DDE­­ (the breakdown product of DDT) and PCBs are clearly linked to children becoming overweight later in life.

Girls more susceptible than boys

After adjusting for other factors that can affect children’s weight (such as their weight at the time of birth and if their mothers smoked during pregnancy), the study teased out the differences between girls and boys. It seems boys' exposure to DDE and PCBs is unrelated to their becoming overweight, though their exposure to DDT as well as having a diet with an average or above average fat intake were linked to their being overweight by age 6.5 years.

The study showed a significant link between the sex of a child and their likelihood of being overweight due to prenatal POPs exposure.

So not only have DDT, DDE and other POPs chemicals been linked to health impacts such as reproductive harm, neurological impacts, endocrine disruptions and various cancers, but now evidence is increasingly pointing towards these chemicals acting as ‘obesogens’— which set young children up for a lifetime of health problems and social issues.

Comments

Alexandre213 / Aug 27, 2013

That is one of the most common diseases nowadays we should take care of things which causes obesity i personally feel that its the thing which can be the reason behind a lot of disease its good if we take care of it.You have written a valid thing mate gonna help people who goes through it

Basically that is something we do not know usually i mean this is something new for us and i must say if we have info about it things like that can help us because its awareness that can help us in keeping ourselves well.

Medha Chandra is PAN's Campaign Coordinator. Her work focuses on pesticide impacts on maternal and children’s health as well as international pesticide campaigns. She works closely with network members from other PAN regional centers around the world. Follow @ChandraMedha